Snow, Tea and Love

Velma Demerson was arrested in 1939 for living with her Chinese boyfriend Harry Yip. Sentenced to 1 year in a Toronto prison, 60 years later she sued the Canadian government for wrongful incarceration, and received an apology in 2002. Want to hear an unbelievable Canadian story? Let us tell you Velma's. In 1939 Velma Demerson was jailed for falling in love with a Chinese man. Pregnant and without legal counsel, Velma was sentenced to one year in prison where she was tortured by a eugenicist doctor who attempted to abort her child. 60 years later she sued the Ontario government for wrongful incarceration, and until her death at age 98 in May 2019, continued to fight for the rights of the thousands of women imprisoned on the grounds of "incorrigibility". Tells the story of Caucasian Velma Demerson, who, in 1938 at age eighteen, was imprisoned under The Female Refuges Act, a statute of the Province of Ontario, which, in its very broad powers, could criminally charge females between the ages of sixteen and thirty-five for incorrigible behavior. Velma's crime, which was reported by her racist father: that she was in a relationship with a Chinese man, Harry Yip. What she thought would make her situation better, and potentially get her out of custody, but which made it worse, was reporting that she at the time was three months pregnant, it a totally different story if the father was Caucasian in a stable family life often overriding the reason of whatever the charge. Shortly after her incarceration, she was moved from facility meaning to rehabilitate to one which was punitive in the way it operated. She tells of the brutal conditions, especially by the prison doctor, Dr. Guess. Beyond her one year incarceration, much of this documentary tells of her fight for justice sixty years after the fact and the fight to ensure that no one ever faces what she and many young women who were imprisoned for suspect reasons faced. An epilogue of sorts tells what is known of Harry and of their son. —Huggo